It’s 2015 and we still hear that software developers are socially challenged. Throw in some pony tails and bad hygiene and you have the complete caricature. But, really, software developers, who shape today’s and tomorrow’s ways of being social, are we asocial? Of course not!

Sure, being a software developer probably means doing some solitary work - we sometimes need to stay focused without being interrupted - but what people don’t get is that engineering Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, Technorati, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare, Youtube, Google+, GroupMe, Snapchat and many, many more digital social platforms, is the result of countless hours of teamwork.

The software developers’ job is all about working together, interacting, helping, teaching and meeting with each other as well as with users and customers. The exact opposite of being asocial. In our working day, as well as in our spare time, we use the powerful social platforms we built for ourselves to collaborate, learn, help each other and communicate our passion: software development.

For *digital immigrants*, the concept of being social may conjure up mages of cocktails, face-to-face conversations and perhaps phone calls, but for us *digital natives*, being social through digital channels is just as powerful. Sometimes even more powerful, as we can exchange thoughts, information and ideas across continents and time zones in ways that would be otherwise impossible.

About ten years ago, more or less everybody started using social media. At the beginning, many were skeptical about what was to come of it, but most of that went away when people found that they could be a part of it

Software developers are visionaries, problem solvers and great communicators. Family members and friends may not always understand what it is that we do “in front of our screens” and we might not always excel at explaining it, so there might be a misunderstanding somewhere. Or are people just skeptical of us because we are a bit ahead? Because we are, aren’t we?